Chapter 90: Harvesting Strange Creatures

by cnwebnovels

Picking up where the last chapter left off: I’d started hunting the toad-like monsters in earnest, glad for the chance to build up my cosmic force of consciousness. Their consciousness in particular carried an obscure quality that let me see this world more clearly.

The toad monsters had circled up and were spitting poisonous mist to keep me from closing in.

That only sharpened my interest in the mist itself. If it could dissolve an opponent’s force of consciousness, then getting my hands on some would let me suppress enemies far more effectively in future fights.

So I stopped attacking, crouched at a distance, and watched.

Seeing me hold off, the monsters didn’t dare scatter either. They stayed huddled in their circle, motionless.

I went back to the killing ground and started dissecting the toad monsters I’d already put down, curious what exactly produced the mist.

Three corpses in, I found it: some unidentifiable chemical, black and murky, stored in glandular sacs between the mouth and nasal cavity. Each creature only carried a small amount on its own, but pooled together in a group, the effect compounded, giving them a genuinely solid defense against outsiders. It really was an effective chemical weapon—highly acidic, and quick to vaporize on contact with air.

Even after I’d harvested the force of consciousness from these corpses, the glands themselves remained intact.

So I tried extracting the substance and flicked a bit into the air to test it. Sure enough, it flashed instantly into poisonous smoke.

I started gathering it in bulk from the bodies.

The monsters huddled together, seeing me switch from attacking to dissecting their fallen comrades, tried throwing spears at me again.

But that little trick couldn’t touch me. And every time they broke formation to throw, I harvested the consciousness of a few more.

Which just forced them to huddle back up.

And every time they huddled, I went right back to dissecting their dead and stripping the toxin from their glands. This went on for several rounds.

Eventually the toad monsters couldn’t stand the torment anymore. They sent one of their own toward me, waving a white flag.

Surrendering to me?

Oh, come on. Keep fighting—I still wanted more consciousness, more toxin. Once they surrendered, I’d feel too awkward to keep harvesting them.

The one holding the white flag approached, trembling, and babbled something in a string of sounds I couldn’t understand at all.

So I tried addressing it through cosmic force of consciousness instead.

It actually worked.

The creature understood me perfectly well, and switched over to cosmic consciousness to speak with me directly. It expressed a wish to make peace, and asked me to spare them.

I told it, “First—you started this fight. You attacked first, I only struck back. Justice is on my side. Second—compensate me with enough toxin and cosmic force of consciousness to make it worth my while.”

The creature hesitated, then said it would go back and discuss it with the others.

While it went to confer, I held off on dissecting the rest of the corpses.

About ten minutes later, four toad monsters approached. Two carried a sealed clay jar between them; the other two hauled a round, emerald-green plant.

Once they’d come close, I opened the jar. Something dark and sticky sat inside. Before I could even get a good look, black smoke boiled up out of it with a hissing sound. One of the creatures hastily clapped the lid back on and said, “Immortal Master, this is Cangyan. It comes from the Cave of Death, deep within Floating Island. We draw a little of it into our glandular sacs and spray it out to defend ourselves when it truly matters.”

I pointed at the emerald sphere and asked through cosmic consciousness, “And this?”

One of them pointed at the green orb and said, “This is the Ningxiang Tree. A local rarity—only ten grow every hundred years. Absorbing it raises one’s force of consciousness. Most of the raiders who invade Floating Island come here for this alone.”

Suspecting a trick, I grabbed one of the toad monsters and dragged it over. “You try it first. I want proof you’re not lying to me.”

The creature said, “Immortal Master, I’ll gladly show you. But know this—we may not be strong, but we do not lie.”

With that, it revealed two small openings just above its enormous mouth—nostrils, hidden until now, invisible under normal circumstances.

Once the nostrils opened, a straw-like tube extended between them, inserted itself into the jar’s lid, and drew out a bit of the black Cangyan, which it sprayed outward. It flashed at once into poisonous smoke. Then the creature turned its gaze to the Ningxiang Tree and drew a little of the consciousness from it. Sure enough, its own force of consciousness rose, just slightly.

I watched every step of it closely and was satisfied they weren’t lying.

I asked, “Are there other creatures on this Floating Island? Anything especially dangerous?”

One of them answered, “Floating Island holds hundreds of species. We Toad Immortals are the largest faction here and the most numerous, but we are not the strongest. That title belongs to a White Bone Hand. It lives underground and feeds on living creatures. Its strength alone is formidable, but the real trouble is that no one knows where it hides. If Immortal Master could rid us of the White Bone Hand, we would gladly offer another Ningxiang Tree in payment.”

So these creatures had suffered under this White Bone Hand too. Not that I owed them anything—I only said I’d see how things went.

What kind of world was this, where even a “White Bone Hand” counted as a living creature? How did it even eat, or fight?

Never mind. No more questions. I’d figure it out for myself, in time.

Once the toad monsters left, I watched them carry off their fallen comrades’ bodies, and felt a twinge of guilt despite myself. They cared for their own kind the way people did. In our fight, they hadn’t managed to do much to me, and yet I’d harvested no small number of their lives.

Though the real reason, of course, was simply that I didn’t know them. Without familiarity, there’s no empathy. People feel differently about a wild wolf than they do about a pet dog. You wouldn’t hesitate to kill the wolf. The dog, you couldn’t bring yourself to touch.

Once the toad monsters had finished, they slipped away, one after another, into the rocks.

I let them be. A quick sweep with same-frequency sensing told me roughly what I needed to know—they lived underground most of the time and came up to the surface to feed.

I compressed the jar of Cangyan with consciousness and tucked it into my Qiankun Pouch.

Fatty Huang, Du Xiaoran’s code-body, had given me the pouch before I left, telling me it would work in any virtual world. Built on the Sumeru technique, it could compress enormous objects down into a storage space. He’d figured it would come in handy once I reached Future World. I hadn’t expected to put it to use on my very first stop.

As for the Ningxiang Tree, I didn’t bother carrying it at all. I simply absorbed it on the spot.

I’d never imagined plants could hold force of consciousness. The tree’s consciousness felt remarkably similar to the toad monsters’ own, carrying that same obscure quality. It seemed likely their consciousness came mainly from this plant to begin with—which would explain the rarity.

Once I’d finished absorbing it, the tree withered rapidly. My cosmic force of consciousness climbed another half rank. Combined with what I’d gained from the slaughter, my cosmic force of consciousness had grown by roughly a full rank altogether.

Looking around, both Floating Island and the once-hazy world beyond it had sharpened considerably. Still, I couldn’t see anywhere beyond the island itself where else I could go. Everything remained gray, misty, endless. No wonder they called this place Floating Island.

It really was like some solitary island adrift in an empty sea, nothing around it at all.

With no other option, I settled in to stay on the island for the time being.

Over the following days, I explored the mountains.

Deep inside the island’s peaks, everything I could see was boulders and wasteland. Only in the shadowed valleys did anything like tall trees manage to grow.

I made my way carefully toward a stretch of open, flat ground, figuring open space would make it easier to spot trouble than a forest ever could. There was no telling whether some beast might come bursting out of the rocks and trees while I wasn’t looking.

I trusted my own abilities well enough. But invisibility was useless here—monsters could see straight through it. That was a real problem. It meant that wherever I went, I’d stand out as an obvious target.

So I settled for open ground and thought I’d make camp there. If anything came at me, at least I’d see it coming.

But the moment I set foot on that flat stretch, the earth split open beneath me. Countless pale bone hands clawed their way up out of the widening cracks, accompanied by a chorus of shrieking wails—wails that drove straight into my consciousness sea.

“A White Bone Hand?”

The toad monsters’ warning came back to me at once.

I quickly shielded my consciousness sea and didn’t even bother going invisible. Invisibility probably wouldn’t help anyway—it hadn’t fooled the toad monsters, and it likely wouldn’t fool this either. Fighting was the only option.

I leaped skyward and rained down palm strikes that wrapped martial technique in force of consciousness, each blow shattering one of the bone hands.

Just as I had with the toad monsters, I probed the shattered remains with my consciousness, and sure enough, drew out a trace of cosmic force of consciousness—slightly more, in fact, than a single toad monster had carried.

Feng Du had been right after all. Future World really was a good place to harvest force of consciousness—not just abundant, but high quality too. Certainly nothing like what the real world offered.

Just as I began to think I could pick off the White Bone Hands as easily as I had the toad monsters, a towering figure rose slowly out of the fissure.

Its white robe trailed all the way down into the earth. Its face was formless, nothing but a pair of hollow, cavernous eyes visible beneath the draped cloth—eyes that seemed to burn with pale green ghostfire.

From every fold of that robe, countless translucent, half-formed souls writhed free—some human, some alien, some in all sorts of strange, incomplete bodies I couldn’t begin to identify. Every one of them stretched a white bone hand toward me, and those hands kept lengthening, kept growing, swaying as they reached to seize hold of me.

What in the world was this thing?

I immediately unleashed a full-force palm technique that wrapped martial technique in force of consciousness at the towering figure—and the effect was almost nothing.

The white-robed giant only swayed slightly, entirely unhurt, and kept advancing at its slow, deliberate pace, its countless bone hands clawing at me as it came.

So this was the true body of the White Bone Hand. I’d assumed all those countless hands were separate creatures in their own right.

This was not going to be easy.

As it advanced, the white-robed giant spoke in a low voice: “You trespass on my forbidden zone and disturb my consciousness. You shall sink into eternal damnation.”

The voice shook even my sealed-off consciousness sea. This was, unmistakably, an attack of pure force of consciousness.

Part of me wanted to just run.

But I couldn’t quite bring myself to walk away from that much cosmic force of consciousness. Judging by the strength of its attack, its rank had to be extremely high.

So I pulled the black Cangyan from my Qiankun Pouch and poured it down over the giant’s white-robed body.

As half the jar of Cangyan poured over its body, coils of black poisonous smoke wound themselves around its form. Only then did the white-robed giant cry out in pain, its body shrinking rapidly.

I didn’t dare hesitate. I fused force of consciousness with martial technique and unleashed everything I had at its head.

Its body collapsed into nothingness—then revived almost at once. I struck it down again, and it revived again. Each time it came back, I had to kill it fast, because that was the moment it was weakest. I refused to believe it couldn’t be killed for good.

I repeated this again and again.

At last, the white-robed giant crashed to the ground with a sound like thunder, and did not rise again.

Its head lay shattered across the earth.